Genre: Essays

A woman draws her story into history.
                                         —Hélène Cixous

1.

My great-grandmother crossed the ocean from Spain to Argentina in 1920, following her husband, who had left her and their two children behind and from whom she hadn’t heard …

Feet are comprised of fifty-two bones, one for every week of the year, a quarter of the total number of bones in an entire human body. There are around 8,000 nerves and 125,000 sweat glands in each one. There are …

In December 1950, Flannery O’Connor boarded a train in Connecticut to visit her mother, Regina O’Connor, in Georgia for Christmas. She was twenty-five years old, had left Georgia at age twenty, and was riding a string of successes. A graduate …

There was something about the catchers. The way they crashed around in their armor, throwing their bodies against the world like they were unbreakable, flashing a secret code between their thighs. You looked at them and understood what they were …

It was almost twenty years ago now that a stranger took my photograph. This had never happened before, not that I knew, and it has not happened again since that night. The photograph was taken in Manhattan, in the upper …

In late February of 2020 I traveled home to Pittsburgh to salvage what I could of my grandparents’ lives. After caring for them and their things during their final years and after, my aunt was moving to Florida and giving …

In the face of precarity, unsustainability, and isolation, artists, activists, and revolutionaries are turning to care. Militant research collective Precarias a la Deriva asked in 2006, “why not begin to imagine and construct an organization of the social that prioritizes …

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you? 
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!

—Robert Browning, “Memorabilia”

Spring semester of 1974, I was a student …

Over morning coffee, I read Science Daily, scanning the titles as if they were Tinder profiles. What do I desire today, I ask, because my appetite for the world is an erotic force that can be kindled by a …